In My Tree 2008
C-print 57x76 cm

Native 2008
C-print 40x50 cm

Cherry Oh Baby 2007
C-print 54x69 cm

Rock Face 2009
C-print 57x76 cm

Walking home with a pink shaggy hat 2008
C-print 57x76 cm

Plastic Bag 2009
C-print 67x94cm

Sweet Leafs 2009
C-print 67x94 cm

Playing by myself 2009
C-print 40x50 cm

Balcony Girl 2008
C-print 40x50cm

In My Tree

Something Here
Epilogue by writer Andrzej Tichý
The Works of Jenny Källman, graphic design: Research and Development.

0. “Incidents and things either come to an end or die; or collapse under their own weight and when I look at them and describe them, it is because they refract the light over themselves, shape it and give it a form that we are able to grasp,” writes Andrzej Stasiuk in Världen bortom Dukla [The World Beyond Dukla].

1. Something shapes the light. The grass meets the gravel meets the water: figures, bodies, shadows. It is a form we are able to grasp. A red clown’s nose between abounding sunlight and a cocktail cabinet engulfed by darkness. I don’t know. What do I do when I want to evoke a white tiger? And which one? A twig in the way, a utilisation of distance. What is it I am asking? To which question is “evoking” the answer?

2. Why is not a question. Why is a frightened cat hissing at the playing wind, at the ominous games of shadows. At blurred masks, at a person that’s been hung but still keeps climbing, at a malicious octopus girl and the mimicry of her victim – the double pony-tails that bring them together, the smaller girl’s transformation from unlike to like. At the stigma of love, a face turned away and the clear signal of a back turned towards you. At an evasive get-together, together alone, an inability to focus on the supposed centre. Supposed because the central thing here is the fact that it is not seen. Or can anyone point out a governing principal?

3. To resemble a reality. The mimicry of these pictures?

4. Try and let the onlooker (as an incident – as a thing) come to an end or die/no/or collapse under its own weight and/no/an inexplicable togetherness and a loneliness pointed at something other than/no.

5. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s anti-essentialism. The aversion of (the myth of) depth is replaced here with ditto against focus, clarity, and also perhaps against verisimilitude. My brain traverses: thus the photograph functioned as a trap in which the artist captured the universe in order to hand it over to society. But we cannot capture, and dominate that which we merely sense. We put an end to the great work of conquering nature and multiplying man’s power. No hubris production, no expansionism. But how?

6. To be here. As a part of being there.

7. No controlling scoptophilia, no suppressed libido?

8. Something is in the way and I want it to stay there like a reminder, true or false, of the fact that the eye – its dark chamber – has nothing to do with it/isn’t a governing principle.

9. I’m urged to lift my gaze somewhere else and glance around the room: notice how things change in appearance as they are further away from you: parallel lines in the floor seem to move closer together; horizontal edges appear to slant; textures compress; details become harder to see. How true is this? And: how conceivable is the difference between a here and a there, between a field of vision and a reality?

10. The continuous against the clearly defined. Infinity and finiteness. Is it true that infinity presupposes the finite? As knowledge does ignorance? Or togetherness solitude? Does it mean that the reality of these pictures presupposes these pictures? A fundamental problem remains: invention or discovery?

12. Two words crop up: makeshift perpetuity. They’re found in Bruno Schulz’s The Sanatorium at the sign of the Hour-Glass: “Then the world was momentarily still; it stood out of breath and dazzled, wanting to be completely at one with that illusory picture, that makeshift perpetuity that had opened up to it.”

13. The temptation of trying to recreate the moment of construction – diagonally downwards, grey-green background behind white cherry blossom, and between these someone who has lost something, someone celebrating something – similar angles, a dark whole surrounded by green in shifting nuances and on the border between the dark and the green, something pink, something blue and something white. Some small people who see something there inside the darkness – and so it continues, repeating patterns, pot-plant green, faded woodland, white in all its guises, a point where worlds meet, the magic of municipal construction, (is this a governing principle?), and sometimes more straightforward: Someone is hiding something. Something happens between someone who is somewhere looking at something; someone takes part of something, someone moves towards or away from something, someone remains with someone else, resembles someone. Something happens here. Something exists here.

Andrzej Tichý, based in Malmö, is the author of the novels Sex liter luft (2005) and Fält (2008).

Jenny Källman is educated at the university of Film and Photography in Gothenburg and The University College of Art, Craft and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm where she took her master of fine arts in 2002.

Källman´s work oscillates between documentary and staged photography. Her work has been described as stills from a film, with her imagery in closely linked to the phantasies of the viewer. A recurring theme in Källman´s work is the vulnerability of young people in strange new worlds, in open or closed spaces. In her earlier work, she has also examined how people behave and interact in these spaces.

Her early work document the rituals and strictly set rules of the urban youth. “Through a thin haze, as if in a slowly dissipating dream, young women are caught up in situations only the initiated know the full meaning of – duels, gang wars, social community interactions, assaults. In her later wirk she has shown herself to be more drawn to the abstract. She makes photographs of her studio, of night time streets, fragments of different material, common or trivial things transformed by different light settings, reflections, mirror images. Or in the words of one commentator: “These [images) are no longer ´moments´and ´places´, they are events and spaces. The images become placeless and magical.”

Jenny Källman is represented at The Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and in many other institutions and private collections. Among many group exhibitions, she has exhibited her work at the show “The Visible” at Artipelag (2014) and at “Golden Sunset” at the Museum of Modern art in Stockholm (2017-2018) with among others fellow photographers Miriam Bäckström, Tova Mozard and Julia Peirone.

In 2016, Källman´s latest book The Rectangle’s Sharp Stare (Art and Theory) was shortlisted for the Sweidsh Photographers Union´s prize for best Swedish book of photography.
Källman is born 1973,lives and works in Stockholm

Education

1998-2002 Konstfack, University College of Art, Craft and Design,Stockholm, Sweden (MFA)

1994–1997 University of Film and Photography, Gothenburg, Sweden (BFA)

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Casino, Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm 2018

Shutter, David Risley Gallery, Köpenhamn 2016

Lounge, Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm 2015

Surveillance, Crystal, Stockholm 2012

Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico City 2011

Caps Light, Crystal Contemporary Art, Stockholm 2011

Borlänge Konsthall, Borlänge 2010

David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark 2009

Instantanés, Institut Suédois, Paris, France 2009

In My Tree, Crystal Palace, Stockholm 2008

Four Seasons, (Xposeptember) Hotell Diplomat, Stockholm 2006

White Tiger, AK28, Stockholm 2006

Galleri 54, Göteborg 2005

Selected Group Exhibitions

Velvet Ropes, David Risley Gallery, Köpenhamn 2018

So Real, Really So, Galleri Thomassen, Göteborg 2018

In The Pines-Slight Return,David Risley Gallery, Köpenhamn 2017

Golden Sunset, Moderna Museet Stockholm 2017

Winter Show, Gallery Steinsland Berliner 2016

On the Immense and the Numberless, David Risley Gallery, Köpenhamn 2016

Fryspunkt, Grundemark Nilsson Gallery, Stockholm 2016

Chart art fair, Köpenhamn 2016

De synliga, Artipelag Konsthall, Stockholm 2014

Voyage, Cercle Suédois, Paris 2014

Grupputställning, Crystal, Stockholm 2014

She´s here, Fotogalleriet, Oslo 2013

Phantasma, Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary, Helsingfors 2013

She´s in the Picture, CFF, Stockholm 2011

Under yta, över tid, Konsthallen i Varberg 2011

Sometimes I wish I could just disappear, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen 2011